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Jesse’s Show

October 29, 2009

Jesse Johnson isn’t considered a top-tier funk/rock talent, though he belongs in their company. More to the point, he’s been in their company: he was part of the Minneapolis axis that brought us Prince and the Time in the mid-eighties, and later on, as a solo artist, he collaborated memorably with Sly Stone on “Crazay.”

Johnson has been silent as a recording artist for more than a decade, which is why it’s surprising that there’s not more fanfare surrounding the release of “Verbal Penetration,” a double-disc album that, over the course of its twenty-nine songs, ranges from Prince-like funk (“100 Watts of Funky”) to Curtis Mayfield-like soul (“U & I R We R Us”) to sophisticated instrumentals full of the guitar prowess that earned Johnson his reputation in the first place. The most noteworthy thing about the album is that it’s excellent—or, rather, that it has a defined mission and focussed execution of that mission. The second half softens into some astrological and philosophical meditations, but even then, it’s on par with ambitious if flawed Prince records like “The Rainbow Children”: songs like “Slave to R Freedom” reasons through race relations with an unexpected lucidity. It’s a big album, almost two hours long, and hard to absorb all at once, but it’s certainly a major moment in Johnson’s body of work, and it would be a shame if it were entirely overlooked.